


one last light to turn out

by misandrywitch



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Bisexuality, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Character Resurrection, Character Study, Flashbacks, Non-Linear Narrative, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:23:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23379883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: A woman walks into Maria DeLuca’s bar, and for a long cold minute she thinks she’s seeing a ghost.
Relationships: Maria DeLuca & Alex Manes, Maria DeLuca & Michael Guerin, Maria DeLuca & Mimi DeLuca, Maria DeLuca & Rosa Ortecho, Maria DeLuca/Rosa Ortecho, Maria Deluca & Liz Ortecho, alex n his girls
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39





	one last light to turn out

**Author's Note:**

> title's from "mrs. potter's lullabye" by counting crows which i know has been done in fic in this fandom but i don't think for these two, so deal with it. there's a piece of maria in every song that i sing...
> 
> i've been meaning to write a series of micro scenes about maria + rosa for a while, & knowing there's a very real possibility they're going to meet in the present in tomorrow's episode i decided today is the time. they make me sad. i'm sad about it. maria deluca deserves to get real damn pissed off about her dead best friend & i hope she has the chance. 
> 
> (this didn't start out as a fic about maria & alex but it found its way in there anyway because - i love him. oh well ho hum.) 
> 
> leescoriesbies.tumblr.com

A woman walks into Maria DeLuca’s bar, and for a long cold minute she thinks she’s seeing a ghost. 

For one horrible and breathless second her mind doesn’t question the fact that it’s being presented with the kind of sight that had been so familiar to her in 2007, 2008. A girl in black - dark hair, dark eyes, red lips - sidling through the front door of The Wild Pony like she’s not really supposed to be there. She never was supposed to be there - underage, and prone to sliding behind the bar when Mimi or the bartender on duty wasn’t looking to toff back the expensive stuff. Winking at Maria and wiping her mouth, red lipstick smear on Sharpie marker smear on her knuckles. 

Mimi never said anything about it, always shaking her head at them and going “I’d rather you drink here and let me drive you home, you know I always will,” one or two discreet calls to parents aside. Maria had thought about that a lot, after it was over. She thinks about it now, ignoring the palm she's supposed to be reading as she stares, stares, stares at the shape coming in through the doorway, every cell in her body turning over in a cold sweat, in a red-and-white haze, in panic, going _ Rosa, Rosa, Rosa - _

“Isn’t that the Ortecho girl?” Racist Hank says, like an answer. 

And then the stranger in her bar steps closer and her gait is wrong, and her height is wrong, and her face is wrong. 

Liz Ortecho smiles at her - and Maria’s mind clears. 

She smiles back. She covers it up with a look. She leans across the bar and hugs Liz to her for the first time in years. 

“I was on my way home but I came to thank you,” Liz says. “I saw what you left at Rosa’s memorial.” 

Maria doesn’t have the right words to answer that so she does what she does best, and she pours them both a drink. 

She had forgotten how alike they looked from a distance. It was up close that the details became clear - and it had been a long ten years. 

* * *

Alex is back in Roswell for a few weeks before Maria asks him to go visit the spot where Rosa died. 

She asks in ideal circumstances, letting them both get a little liquored up on her living room couch. She’d granted herself a night off because Alex had acquiesced to coming over with a funny hesitance, like he’s certain his presence will make her uncomfortable. Tequila-warmed, Maria can’t stop looking at him. The physical reminder he’s alive - so different from years of long-distance correspondence, his occasional visits that got fewer and fewer as he got older. 

“Of course I will,” Alex says. His elbow is propped on the back of the couch and his shoulders turn towards her with intention. Maria senses he’s making himself relax. She reads pain in the space above his head, red and black shadows in the light. But she doesn’t comment on it. 

So they drive out to the stretch of highway where Rosa died together, in Maria’s truck. Alex doesn’t comment about going to the grave itself. They’d been there together at her funeral, all black-clad and too-hot in the near-summer weather. Liz had been frigid, locked inside herself. Alex had the shadow of a bruise under his jawline, and his face looked a lot younger without eyeliner. Three days later he’d told her he was enlisting. 

Maria had cried enough for all three of them, because she’d felt somebody had to. 

She goes back to the grave on occasion, scrubs off graffiti and leaves flowers and cuts the grass short around it. Arturo Ortecho goes to see it sometimes too, and he knows that she visits and they never mention it to each other. It’s one of those things. 

But a grave is just a marker for something - symbolic but not significant. And she’s never had the stomach to face this stretch of highway alone. 

It’s hot, and the wind whistles past them as she parks the truck on the side of the road and gets out. A semi whizzes by, pushing the speed limit, so they wait until it’s gone and the grit in the wind in its wake hurts Maria’s face. Alex wipes his eyes. 

“Always forget how big the sky is out here,” he says. Without clouds, the sky is so blue it hurts Maria’s eyes. 

“I don’t have anything to compare it to,” she says.

“Trust me,” he says, and steps into the scrub brush with surprising deftness. He stops, when he sees the wooden cross. Knocked askew, beer cans indicating it’s been used for target practice. “Jesus.” 

“Roswell’s always keeping it classy,” Maria says. She scoops up some crumpled cans, shaking dirt off of then. They stand there for a while, looking at the cross and the sky and the scrub brush. Maria feels a little silly. She’d wanted to feel something so big that it hurt, in a symbolic way. “I’m sorry. I don’t really know why I - “

“No.” Alex shakes his head, cutting her off. “It’s okay.” 

Alex bends a little stiffly and then straightens, jabbing his crutch into the grass to steady himself. He’s put something on the cross that he must have had in his pocket. It’s a sculpture of a heart, woven metal spindles painted in a rainbow. It twists a little in the breeze, catching the light. Red and blue and green. 

Maria looks at him, not understanding. Alex shrugs. His eyebrows touch. 

“She’d hate it,” Alex says, shaking his head. His eyes are merry and sad at the same time. “Call me a name.” 

“Absolutely loathe it.” Her voice is sticky, nearly catching. 

“I don’t want people to forget how funny she was.” 

He turns back towards her truck. Footsteps crunch in the dirt in an uneven cadence. Maria pauses a moment, watching the painted heart twist in the wind. It tosses her hair into her face, sticking to her mouth. 

She doesn’t know what that means, him leaving something so silly and trite behind. Some shared inside joke. Alex thought it important enough to remember, to act on. He doesn’t act on things he doesn’t deem important. 

Maria wonders, sometimes, who else still carries around Rosa’s secrets. They could have spread all across the world, by now. 

They drive back towards town in silence that’s mostly companionable, Alex with his left knee pulled into his chest looking out the window. He used to prop his Docs, laces trailing, on the dash of her truck when the two of them and Rosa would drive it past the edges of town looking for fresh air, a space to play music loud without someone telling them to behave. Maria keeps looking at him, expecting to see a stranger in her friend’s face. He’s changed - neat edges rather than fronts, hardened to stand up against things rather than bend under them. He won’t come by the bar. They’d spent hours as kids playing darts and pool and hassling customers in the Pony, sneaking beers, fighting for control of the music, crushing peanut shells. Now he won’t go inside it, unspoken. The shape of his body is different. Muscle in his shoulders and arms, clean unpainted fingernails, and the limp, the crutch, the space where his other foot should be.

Alex turns up the radio in her truck, hums along right in his throat. That’s familiar and steady and she recognizes it. She recognizes him, even after all this time.

* * *

Liz hovers at the edge of the high school gymnasium, looking awkward and on-edge. She’s with Max Evans, for some unknown reason but Maria ignores that to focus on her face. That expression - knowing you’re being talked about, knowing you’re hated. 

The idea comes to her quickly, and she dislodges herself from the next forgettable white lady she went to school with who wants to know if she’ll get pregnant this year and makes a beeline for the band. 

She officially took over the bar two years ago, but had been functionally running it for longer. They couldn’t afford to turn away easy money, even when it came from places like Wyatt Long. So Maria put up with him and smiled through it and took her revenge in little ways. 

She kept Rosa’s photo framed above the bar, for one thing, and threw out everyone who dared to comment on its presence there. And she played her tunes. 90’s nights, every other Friday. A little Alanis and she’d sing every word over the rhythm of cocktail shakers and pool cues and would never let Long change the song. Her bar, her rules. 

“Hey, man,” Maria waves at the hired band’s lead singer, leaning forward just enough that he can get a view down her top. “Do you take requests?” 

“For you, sure,” he says, smiling. 

“You know _ Mrs. Potter’s Lullabye?” _

“Uh,” the guy blinks. “Sure, I guess so. Might forget a verse or two but - “

“That’s fine,” Maria winks at him, and turns back into the crowd. She catches Liz’s eye across the room and grins when those recognizable chords start, grins more when she sees Liz realize what she’s hearing. They meet in the middle of the room, and Maria shakes her skirt and her hair out, throws her head back and her arms around. Liz is laughing. She dances through the song, all seven minutes of it, until the room spins and she forgets where she is and how short they are on cash this week and that it’s been ten years and everything else but the music.

* * *

Rosa loved her secrets. 

Maria says that to Liz like an afterthought, something Liz should know about her sister, but she wonders - as they tramp around in the mud under city bridges, and toss books from Rosa’s dusty bookshelf - if that’s still really true. Rosa hoarded them, spinning everything into a conspiracy, an adventure, a story. Maria had loved that about her. Had hated it. Both extremes, caught in a pendulum’s arc between them - that was caring about Rosa. Still is, in a lot of ways. She threw a man out of the Pony a few weeks ago for commenting on the portrait hanging behind the bar. 

Liz looks like her sister in the haze of cannabis smoke, grey and white against the dark sky. The roof of the Crashdown was always somewhere she and Rosa came together. She and Rosa and sometimes Alex, nervously lighting cigarettes and strumming his guitar. Maria has to realign that fact in her head a little, tell herself whose dark head of hair she’s looking at. 

She gets Liz laughing, recounting the bullshit Chad with the Chevy pulled before she dumped his ass. And then Liz is resting her shoulder against Maria’s shoulder as Maria traces the shape of constellations in the sky, arcs of stars. She’s warm and solid, familiar and not at all the same as the kid she was. Maria finds herself holding her breath, talking through it. 

“What did you and Rosa do up here?”

“We smoked,” Maria waves the joint. “Drank. Looked at the stars and,” she pauses and the unexpected wash of nostalgia, “the first one to find Pisces got to dare the other one to do something really stupid.” 

“I didn’t realize,” Liz says slowly, pulling the joint out of Maria’s hand, “you two did so many things without me. I mean I did, I guess. It made me jealous, what I knew about. But she hid things from me.” 

“She hid things from me too,” Maria says. She requisitions the joint, holding onto it like a memory. “I hated her for it, sometimes.” 

Liz looks at her, her big eyes all reflective and glazed. She doesn’t blink at that.

“But also,” Maria says, fueled by the cannabis and the night sky and Liz’s lack of judgment, her adult-flat expression, “sometimes I think I was kind of in love with her, too.” 

And Liz nods like she understands that. She does, but she doesn’t, and Maria doesn’t know what she means exactly but she does know it was true. 

“I don’t see a fish,” Liz says after a second, looking back at the sky. “It just looks like an arrow to me.” 

“That’s what Rosa always used to say,” Maria says, fond. “Maybe you two didn’t think so differently after all.” 

And then - Liz is scrambling across the rooftop and another one of Rosa’s secrets unfurls like a ribbon. A letter, hiding on that roof for a decade. Something else Maria had no idea about, another half-told story couched in mysteries that aren’t even real. She leaves Liz to it, and climbs down off the roof alone.

* * *

Rosa’s death left a gulf in her life. It’s blindingly obvious to put it like that, but it’s true. It’s easy for Maria to look back and divide everything in her life into a Before and an After, with Rosa right at the center of that. When she died something broke in all of them. It scattered them, so swiftly cruelly it might have even been purposeful. 

They were supposed to do that, of course. That summer loomed like a big exclamation mark announcing their freedom, their adulthood, the promise of the great big beyond. Liz was going off to college on a full ride, ready to see both coasts. Valenti had his football scholarship. Alex was counting the minutes and looking up bus schedules, saving cash.

As for Maria - she hadn’t really made her mind up yet. It didn’t really matter. Her mother had given her a free pass - time to do whatever the fuck she wanted for a little while before deciding if she really wanted to come back to Roswell and run the bar. She liked the idea of that, most of the time. Herself, at the head of The Wild Pony. Something tangible passed down through the family. 

It was supposed to be like that - the way they’d all planned it. 

She’d gotten used to it, the certainty of having people who have your back even when it’s complicated. She and Liz - and she and Alex - and the two of them and both Ortechos - and the five of them, Liz and Rosa, Alex and Valenti and her too, taking over counter space in the Crashdown on weeknights until Alex’s curfew sent him home early. Rosa and Alex would swap off playing the guitar or haggle over the jukebox, and they’d tease Maria affectionately for how she’d almost knock out the busboy with her elbows while she danced in circles.

Things had started splintering a long time before Rosa died, of course. Rosa went to rehab right after her own high school graduation, and came back with more shadows and more secrets. Alex and Valenti - previously always attached at the hip and caught up in their gross boy best friend jokes - stopped speaking, unless their conversations ended in locker room confrontations circling around the mean gossip that always seemed to follow Alex around. Not long after that, Liz and Kyle started going out. And Alex came back from winter break their junior year with a hole pierced in his ear and a scowl, letting Rosa smudge black eyeliner under his eyes, shuttering almost everybody else out with a neat intensity. 

So it wasn’t perfect. But it was high school. They were supposed to live through shit and then get what they wanted most as a reward for surviving it. 

Rosa’s death unmoored them all. And one by one they left - and Maria stayed behind.

* * *

She doesn’t intend to sleep with Michael Guerin, but it’s also not exactly a surprise. 

It’s not exactly a surprise because she’s been smoking, and he’s been drinking, and she’s upset about her mom, and he’s upset about something she hasn’t asked after. And the night is beautiful and clear. And they’re lost but not really lost. And he is sweet, really, when he’s not pretending to be something he’s not - which is most of the time. A loose thread of tension’s been pulling there for a while, the kind she likes tugging at now and then to see what will happen when she does. Most of the time, it’s outweighed by the fact that Guerin’s really damn good at pissing her off. But not right now. 

There’s a beetle in her boot when she wakes up, and she blinks at it, and then into the sun, and then at the near-comical outlined shape of Guerin with his hat on his head. 

“Damn it,” she hisses, and he shakes his head, makes excuses. 

“Sex secrets are the exception,” he says, and stands. 

Maria glares at him, blinking sun and dust out of her eyes and her hair. She hasn’t done anything quite this stupid since her mom took a real downturn, weighing responsibility. It throws her right back to the gleeful irresponsibleness of youth, camping tentless in the summers with Rosa - 

She sits up, shaking dust out of her boots. In the morning light, their destination is very obvious and she feels very stupid. She strides off, and Guerin follows her, and Maria can’t tell what he’s thinking at all. 

In fact, she’s never been able to get a read on Michael Guerin as long as she’s known him. Not that there isn’t anything there to be read and more like it’s laid out in a language Maria can’t make sense of. 

Most people are intuitive, instinctual. Their emotions and thoughts color the space they move in. They find her even when Maria doesn’t want them to, and she’s gotten good at ignoring the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s futures and pasts over the years. It overwhelmed her as a little girl, never quite able to tell what emotions where hers and which belonged to other people and where that line lived. Inside her own head or out of it. These days, she doesn’t pry without good reason to - good paying reasons or genuine worry. It gives her a little extra cash, a definite leg up as a pourer of drinks and dispenser of advice, an inch in to helping her friends with things they might not know how to say out loud. Guerin’s like a bunch of static electricity up there, dizzying and not in a fun way. She’s never seen anything like that in someone’s head. She doesn’t look hard now. 

She doesn’t have to be able to get into his head to tell what he’s thinking, really. He’s been drinking at her bar for years and Maria always knows when something is up with Guerin because some asshole’s getting his face slammed into her pool table. Guerin’s in a bad mood when she’s kicking him out a few days in a row. He’s in a better one when he’s sweet about apologizing for it later. 

In a way, it’s kind of a relief. It removes the temptation, and the possible consequence of having to worry about what she might glimpse there. 

“So,” Maria says, as Liz gets into the car to drive back to Roswell, “how was your night?”

“Weird,” Liz says, shaking her head. She looks like she hasn’t slept, much. “How was yours?” 

She clocks Maria’s chaotic hair, yanked up into a ponytail, and the dust on her boots, with an affectionate eyeroll. 

“Weird,” Maria says, and leaves it at that.

* * *

Alex’s aura is green, and red and black, and green again. Something shifting and hopeful and different than usual. It’s a little unusual, seeing something so clearly near happiness near the surface of his thoughts. She tries not to pry much but sometimes it’s hard not too. 

The minute she says Michael Guerin’s name everything about Alex goes grey and flat; his eyes, his jaw, his aura. Walls up, warned and alert. 

“Please tell me you’re in love with Wyatt Long,” Maria says in near-numbness. After a second Alex shakes his head, the motion like clockwork. And no matter what she says, that greyness stays in place. She feels stupid, caught off guard and wrong-footed. Things she avoids, most of the time. The facts won’t line up right in her mind to make sense even though she tells them they have to. 

They have to because she’s watching Alex across the bar counter and she thought he was dead once. They have to, because she’s looking back and back at things she missed, things she avoided, things she overlooked. 

There’s more there than she would like to admit, on good days. 

Alex and Michael Guerin.

For some reason, that brings her a lot closer to the edge of a lot of other questions she’s tried to avoid asking herself. Particularly lately, ten years later. 

Alex and Michael Guerin - 

For a weird and dizzying second Maria wants to ask him that question - the trite one that always seems to get asked - _ When did you realize and how did you know? _Like realizing your own sexuality is akin to somebody whirling away a curtain to reveal what’s been hidden. Behind door number four! Grand prize. 

She knows the outcome of his story, the slow changes in him, the rumors, his faltering attempts to tell her in his own words and his own terms before he rumors got there first. She’d known, and had waited until he told her anyway, and afterwards he’d allowed some good-natured ribbing about a childhood crush on Kyle Valenti - until that stopped being funny. But he hadn’t been specific about the lead-up. If there was a moment. Or if, like a lot of things about Alex, it was just a fact about him right from the beginning and what he’d needed was the time to find his own words for it. 

And the question would have an ulterior motive anyway, if she asked it. Because what she really wants is the question she could ask after that conversation, the follow-up. And how do I know that I - 

But it’s been ten years. She barely remembers what ten years ago felt like, now. The version of herself that lived ten years ago was like a half-sketch of the woman she turned into, like all of them were. She grew up. Grew into herself, grew out of a lot of things.

Rosa didn’t have that chance. Rosa’s eternally nineteen inside Maria’s head, with red paint underneath her fingernails and mascara smudges under her eyes. Bawling on Maria’s bed at two in the morning. Sneaking tequila from behind the bar. Sliding a lost earring back into Maria’s ear. Tearing pages out of her own paperbacks, certain there’s something hidden inside them. Rubbing Maria's back as she's barfing into the toilet in the Ortecho's place, trying not to wake Arturo. Always, always making her laugh - making her worry - making her sick with laughter and worry in a cycle that didn't seem to have an end until it did. 

Always like that, because she was stopped there. 

And it seems insane, doesn’t it? To realize something like that - ten years later? 

So she just pours Alex another drink, and smiles, and after a moment Alex smiles back.

* * *

“The nurse said that last week you were crying about Rosa Oretcho,” Maria says, trying to keep her voice steady and her face light. Slow and patient is what her mom needs - and slow and patient aren’t things she’s great at. She’s had a lot of practice, in the last year. So she says this like it isn’t upsetting. “It’s been ten years since she died, Mom.” 

“Not always,” Mimi says, and her face isn’t confused or upset or lost like it gets sometimes, somewhere in an imaginary universe and her own memory. It’s certain. “Sometimes it happened just yesterday.” 

And then she’s frowning, pained, almost showing her age. Maria’s chest hurts, like heartburn. 

“Sometimes it’s been a century,” Mimi says, and Maria grips her mother’s elbows as hard as she feels she can without hurting her. She feels the bones there under her fingers, and her pulse where Maria’s fingers find the crook of each arm and she hopes that her mother that feel that too. Something solid, connective to now and here and truth and reality and that she’s not lost where even Maria can’t see it, lost somewhere she can’t go.

* * *

Maria’s combing the downtown blocks of Roswell, trying to find a lamp post she hasn’t hung up a MISSING PERSON sign on yet, when she sees it. 

It’s in a back alley, an old duck-in-to-smoke refuge she used on occasion when she still smoked cigarettes. Hidden behind a corner, it could almost be overlooked. A spraypainted stencil outline, lime green and black and red. A cartoon alien, a ghost, some letters. The kind of thing anybody with the right kind of stencil and five minutes could slap on a wall - but it stops Maria right in her tracks. The posters almost drop from her hands. 

She’d been down this alley once, seventeen and chilly in the winter, watching for anybody who looked like a cop coming down the street. She’d been nervous, Rosa jaunty - manic, before either of them knew what that really meant. The hiss of the spraypaint, the rush of adrenaline in her ears. Rosa’s hands on her shoulders hustling her out of the alley as soon as she was done and her laughter and that feeling of sharing a secret. Every time she walked past the alley after that Maria would think of that secret. 

They’d painted over the stencil years ago, of course. And Maria doesn’t remember what the original one had been. But the new one - the resemblance is familiar enough to stop her. 

She touches the paint with her hand, traces it with her finger. The wall is warm so maybe that's why the paint still feels faintly gummy and new. Images rise in her mind from where her hand meets the wall. Memories or premonitions, she's not sure. She pushes them down, and straightens the stack of posters as she leaves the alley and the paint behind. 

* * *

A woman walks into Maria DeLuca’s bar, and for a long cold minute she thinks she’s seeing a ghost. 

When she hears the noise in the empty bar she assumes, for a hopeful second, that it’s her mom. She’s doing inventory in the back, the kind of thing she might trust to somebody else but it clears her head to work on something solid and actual. Numbers of things, rather than the conceptual numbers involved in running a business. Early morning and the lights are off, nobody else around. Without music on in the background, the creak of the Pony’s back door is unmistakable. 

Maria leaps to her feet, dislodging boxes of cocktail napkins and straws. Heart thudding. 

“Mom?”

No answer, and the next-best explanation is something worse. So she does the practical thing and slides out of the back room into the hallway, ducks under the bead curtain into the main bar and snags the little pistol that her mom, and now her, have long kept underneath the bar behind the cocktail onions. 

“Hello?” she says. “If you’re here to rob us, I am armed and not interested in talking about it.” 

There’s another creak, the ghost of a footfall. The gun feels stupid and clumsy in her hands and Maria’s never had an occasion to fire it, brandish it once or twice but never set it off inside the bar, and she hasn’t really been looking forward to that. She wishes Guerin was actually loitering around the parking lot but his truck has been in and out for days and it’s not there. 

“Stop playing around,” Maria says, sharp. “Very funny, you scared me. Now fuck off before I - “ 

There’s another step, and someone comes around the back door hallway. A woman, long dark hair wearing black. For half a second Maria relaxes, thinking it’s Liz. 

But it’s not. 

The Ortecho sisters always looked so alike, from far away. It’s up close that the details become obvious. Her gait, her height, her face. The mole next to her eye. The energy she pulls from the air. It’s been a long ten years but Maria never forgot. The pressure in her chest feels like burning, like something turned upside-down and wrong. Twisted in a way it shouldn’t be. Broken. In clear relief, there’s no doubt. 

“Rosa?” Maria finds her voice and says the only word she can manage. She has to catch the edge of the bar counter to stay upright.

“Hey, Maria,” Rosa Ortecho, ten years dead, smiles the way she always smiled. Teeth and red lips and something still sad in her eyes, and a little angry. “Been a while. Sorry about that.”


End file.
